Clues to Christie (10 page)

On Agatha Christie and Poisons

Here
is
sleep
and
solace
and
soothing,
of
pain
—

courage
and
vigour
new!

Here
is
menace
and
murder
and
sudden
death!

In
these
phials
of
green
and
blue.

Beware
of
the
Powers
that
never
die

though
men
may
go
their
way,

The
Power
of
the
Drug,
for
good
or
ill,

shall
it
ever
pass
away?

—from “In the Dispensary” by Agatha Christie

It was while I was working in the dispensary that I first conceived the idea of writing a detective story . . . I began considering what kind of detective story I could write. Since I was surrounded by poisons, perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method I selected . . .

—from
An Autobiography
by Agatha Christie

A
gatha Christie played her part in the war effort during both the First and Second World Wars when she worked as an apothecary in a hospital dispensary. Initially she enlisted as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) of the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, but when a dispensary opened she was asked to make the change and embarked upon her pharmaceutical training, eventually gaining her qualifying certificate from the Society of Apothecaries in London. She describes in
An Autobiography
:

To
be
introduced
suddenly
to
the
Periodic
Table,
Atomic
Weight,
and
the
ramifications
of
coal-tar
derivatives
was
apt
to
result
in
bewilderment.
However, I found
my
feet,
mastered
the
simpler
facts,
and
after
we
had
blown
up
our
Cona
coffee
machine
in
the
process
of
practising
Marsh
’
s
test
for
arsenic
our
progress
was
well
on
the
way.

It was during Christie’s training that she encountered not only an array of poisons but also some memorable characters; she describes Mr. P. the pharmacist in
An Autobiography
:

During
the
course
of
my
pharmaceutical
instruction
on
Sunday
afternoons, I was
faced
with
a
problem.
It
was
incumbent
upon
the
entrants
to
the
examination
to
deal
with
both
the
ordinary
system
and
the
metric
system
of
measurements.
My
pharmacist
gave
me
practice
in
making
up
prescriptions
to
the
metric
formula.
Neither
doctors
nor
chemists
like
the
metrical
system
in
operation.
One
of
our
doctors
at
the
hospital
never
learned
what
“
containing
0.1
”
really
meant,
and
would
say,
“
Now
let
me
see,
is
that
solution
one
in
a
hundred
or
one
in
a
thousand?
”
The
great
danger
of
the
metric
system
is
that
if
you
go
wrong
you
go
ten
times
wrong.

On this particular afternoon I was having instruction in the making of suppositories, things which were not much used in the hospital, but which I was supposed to know how to make for the exam. They are tricky things, mainly owing to the melting point of cocoa butter, which is their base. If you get it too hot it won’t set; if you don’t get it hot enough it comes out of the moulds the wrong shape. In this case Mr. P. the pharmacist was giving me a personal demonstration, and showed me the exact procedure with the cocoa butter, then added one metrically calculated drug. He showed me how to turn the suppositories out at the right moment, then told me to put them into a box and label them professionally as so-and-so “one in a hundred.” He went away then to attend to his other duties, but I was worried, because I was convinced that what had gone into these suppositories was 10% and made a dose of one in ten each, not one in a hundred. I went over his calculations and they were wrong. In using the metric system he had got his dot in the wrong place. But what was a young student to do? I was the merest novice, he was the best known pharmacist in town. I couldn’t say to him “Mr. P. You have made a mistake.” Mr. P. the pharmacist was the sort of person who does not make a mistake, especially in front of a student. At this moment, re-passing me, he said “You can put those into stock; we do need them sometimes.” Worse and worse. I couldn’t let those suppositories go into stock. It was quite a dangerous drug that was being used. You can stand far more of a dangerous drug if it is being given through the rectum, but all the same . . . I didn’t like it, and what was I to do about it? . . .

There was only one thing for it. Before the suppositories cooled, I tripped, lost my footing, upset the board on which they were reposing and trod on them firmly.

Mr. P., as Christie would later recall, was an unusual man who carried in his pocket a lump of poison called curare, which would be fatal should it enter the bloodstream—apparently it made him feel powerful. Five decades later, Mr. P. would provide the inspiration for a character in
The Pale Horse,
and curare would feature in a number of other stories, though no character was ever poisoned with it.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles
was Christie’s first novel and it capitalized on her recent experiences. In it a handful of characters were associated with health care: the murder victim’s doctor, Dr. Wilkins; Dr. Bauerstein who Christie describes as “one of the greatest living experts on poisons”; an assistant chemist called Albert Mace; and Cynthia Murdoch—a dispenser/apothecary based on Christie herself.

The murder method? Poison, of course. In this case strychnine, delivered within a heart tonic. The quality of the description of the poison and how it was administered did not go unnoticed and Christie received the rarest of reviews for a piece of literary fiction.
The Pharmaceutical Journal
wrote: “This novel has the rare merit of being correctly written—so well done, in fact, we are tempted to believe either the author had pharmaceutical training or had called in a capable pharmacist to help in the technical part.” She could not have received a better promotional activity.

Christie returned to dispensing once again during the Second World War: “On the whole it was much simpler than it had been in my young days, there were so many pills, tablets, powders and things already prepared in bottles.”

She continued to maintain her pharmaceutical knowledge long after she stopped dispensing, as it had become such a vital element of her writing. One of her famous notebooks recorded such research:

Ethylene Glycol—colourless sweet taste. Substitute for glycerine— freeze and preserving substance. 100 grams drunk in schnapps was fatal.

Kava-kava— narcotic pepper— produces joyous sensation—drowsiness.

It cannot be disputed that the experience of working in a dispensary was one of the key reasons for Christie’s success as a crime writer, but a life in the dispensary would never have been her first choice of career:

I can’t say that I enjoyed dispensing as much as nursing. I think I had a real vocation for nursing, and would have been happy as a hospital nurse. Dispensing was interesting for a time, but became monotonous—I should never have cared to do it as a permanent job.